With Alfred Hitchcock pulling the suspense
strings, The Man Who Knew Too Much is a good
thriller. Hitchcock backstops his mystery in
the colorful locales of Marrakesh in French
Morocco and in London. While drawing the
footage out a bit long, he still keeps suspense
working at all times and gets strong performances from the two stars and other cast
members. Hitchcock did the same pic under
the same title for Gaumont-British back in 1935.

James Stewart ably carries out his title duties: he is a doctor vacationing in Marrakesh
with his wife and young son. When he witnesses a murder and learns of an assassination scheduled to take place in London, the
boy is kidnapped by the plotters to keep the
medico's mouth shut.

Stewart's characterization is matched by
the dramatic work contributed by Doris Day
as his wife. Both draw vivid portraits of tortured parents when their son is kidnapped.
Additionally, Day has two Jay Livingston-Ray
Evans tunes to sing: Whatever Will Be and
We'll Love Again, which are used storywise
and not Just dropped into the plot.

Young Christopher Olsen plays the son naturally and appealingly.

J a m e s S t e w a r t ' s T h e M a n W h o K n e w T o o M u c h

( P a r a m o u n t - 1 9 5 6 )Rear Window's success led Paramount to propose numerous properties to
Stewart and Hitchcock for a follow-up. They settled on another version
of The Man Who Knew Too Much, a spy tale that the director had already
done in England in 1934 before moving to the United States. Hitchcock
had considered doing a remake as early as 1942, with the plot then
centered around frustrating an assassination attempt against the
president of Brazil. Concerns about South American political alliances
during the war had put a damper on that venture.

Hitchcock made no bones about the fact that he wanted The Man Who Knew Too Much to be much more of an American family
entertainment than Rear Window. To this end he made sure that any
highbrow connotations in international intrigues and Albert Hall
settings were neutralized by establishing McKenna as the Ugliest of
Americans, at sea with just about anything foreign, and by having Jay
Livingstone and Ray Evans write the popular (and Oscar-winning) ditty
Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be) for Day. In more than one instance, he also didn't hesitate to choose melodramatic action before
dramatic plausibility or to drop in awkward comedy bits. The result was
an often lumpy two hours (the 1934 film had run eighty-four minutes)
that the director, without any apparent irony, contrasted to the initial
picture by saying that "the first was the work of a talented amateur and
the second was made by a professional"

In truth, the picture would have been among Hitchcock's most
forgettable exercises if not for two sequences. The more celebrated one is
the climactic shooting at the Albert Hall, where the director employed
134 cuts on the music track in little more than four minutes while
showing the assassin getting ready for his shot, Stewart's McKenna trying
to convince the theater's security guards of the danger, and Day's Jo
coming to the decision of her life between thinking only of her son or
doing something to prevent the assassination. But most strikingly for a
sequence traditionally identified with the progress of the Benjamin
sonata to the fatal beat of the kettledrums, much of its power actually
derives from the total silence of the actions of the main characters,
including a long series of shots that make the Stewart character's urgings
to the police inaudible. The same technique is used in the final scenes at
the embassy, with Day's singing off-camera playing off what are little
more than photographs of the building's upper recesses.

In terms of character, however, the most effective scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much comes much earlier in Morocco, when Stewart's
doctor tries to get his wife to take a sedative in preparation for telling her
that their son has been kidnapped. As emotionally ravaging as the cause
of his actions should have been, it develops into a study of cold manipulativeness that centers the tone for a married relationship hollow at the
core. The conspicuous difference from other Hitchcock treatments of
married life is in the fact that it is the woman in The Man Who Knew Too Much who draws all the sympathy—a note maintained for the rest of the film in underlining how the doctor has made his wife leave her showbusiness career, how he is less open to foreign experiences than she is, and how he is continually a step or two behind her in working out the
ways to retrieve their son. Interestingly, Day is not only one of the very
few Hitchcock heroines in a major picture to portray a wife, but
absolutely the only one to play a mother.

There was considerable confusion around The Man Who Knew Too
Much, much of it occasioned by the fact that screenwriter John Michael
Hayes remained in Hollywood for most of the shooting, completing ten
pages of script a day and then sending them off to Morocco or London
by courier for instant filming. To make matters worse, Hitchcock insisted
on running even the belatedly delivered pages past one Angus McPhail, a
former British Intelligence officer to whom he was personally indebted
but who was so far advanced in succumbing to alcoholism that he
couldn't stop shaking long enough to offer his comments on some of the
film's espionage details. Bernard Miles was one who confessed to being
dismayed by Hitchcock's overall distractedness during production, telling
one interviewer that the director "certainly did not annoy the cast with
excessive attention." Equally put off was Day, who had seen some of the
raised eyebrows when she had been chosen for the part of Jo McKenna
and who had interpreted Hitchcock's lack of comments about her
performance as a sign of disapproval. After a couple of weeks of the silent
treatment, she went to see him.

"I told him I knew I wasn't pleasing him, and that if he wanted to replace me with someone else, he could. He was astonished. He said it was quite the reverse, that he thought I was doing
everything just right—and that if I hadn't been, he would have told me.
Then he said he was more frightened—of life, of rejection, of relationships—than anyone. He told me he was afraid to walk across the
Paramount lot to the commissary because he was so afraid of people. I
remember feeling so sorry for him when he told me this, and from that
point I felt more relaxed about working for him."

Having been through far worse with the director, Stewart went
around reassuring his fellow players that Hitchcock knew what he was
doing. Still, he didn't wait for the filmmaker to suggest that he and Day
rehearse the sedative scene. And when Hitchcock arrived on the set for
filming, he said little more than ACTION and CUT as the two actors
completed in a single take the most revealing sequence in the picture. To
this day, Day has no explanation why everything seemed to click on the
first try. She says:

"It was amazing. Maybe it was just that God was with
me that day"

On the other hand, she has had little problem explaining
that she brought to the scene:

"I actually experienced the feeling that I was losing my little son to a kidnapper. I was living that ordeal."

The Man Who Knew Too Much proved to be another money tree for
Paramount. Not all the fruit was wormless, however. The picture was
opened in Los Angeles in May 1956 as a benefit for a vaguely defined
religious group that declared among its intentions "combating the
inroads of Communism" in India. Writer Hayes got into a protracted
battle with Hitchcock over credit for the screenplay and, after four films,
did not work with him again. And in the mid-1960s, the director and
Stewart got into a legal tangle with Paramount over what they regarded
as the studio's improper distribution of the picture to television.